How Etsy Dodged Destruction at the Hands of Amazon

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Follow-Up Friday is our attempt to put the news into context. Once a week, we’ll call out a recent headline, provide an update, and explain why it matters.

When Amazon launched Handmade—a portal for artisans to sell their jewelry, home decor, artwork, and other hand-crafted goods — last year at the seasonally crafty time of October, journalists and analysts were quick to foretell doom for Etsy. Here was the corporate giant, coming to squish a smaller competitor beneath its heavy boot. Just as Barnes & Noble had decimated independent bookshops only to find itself toppled by Amazon, now Etsy — the original marketplace for independent crafters online — would similarly crumble at the e-commerce leviathan’s feet. For Amazon, launching Handmade was another checkbox in its sweeping plan to command an empire of fashion and home goods. Amazon has also acquired luxury fashion retailer Shopbop; shoes, clothing, and accessory retailer 6pm; online shoe store Zappos; as well as BeautyBar.com, Casa.com, and Wag.com for pet owners. Now it was going after small-scale makers.

Sensing the demand for unique, handcrafted goods, Amazon saw an opportunity in bringing the benefits of its platform (and perks such as Prime shipping) to the world of arts and crafts. But artisans who have tried out the platform have been less sanguine. Many saw an awkward interface and overly steep fees. Amazon’s benefits remain largely unproven to them — Handmade’s emphasis on fast turnaround, for example, is at odds with the reality of crafting unique products by hand. Plus it didn’t hurt that Etsy, with its status as a B-corp, seemed to espouse particularly maker-friendly values.

The crafters took note, and snubbed their noses at Amazon.

The year of 2015 was rough on Etsy. It was celebrating its 10-year anniversary, and weathering a crisis. When Etsy started in 2005, it embodied both the ideals of the early internet and the values of the crafting movement. Founded in an apartment in Brooklyn before “twee” became a dirty word, Etsy promised to create a “new economy” that fostered a personal connection between buyers and sellers. Longtime crafters flocked to the platform, and Etsy grew swiftly. In addition to exposing makers’ wares to a wider public, Etsy offered an extensive seller’s handbook and began hosting crafting classes and seminars at “Etsy labs” in Brooklyn, aimed at helping artisans grow their businesses.

But success was a double-edged sword for a company with indie roots. As individual sellers’ businesses boomed on Etsy, those crafters found themselves unable to keep up with the demand. They desired to expand in traditional ways — by hiring staff and outsourcing work — but doing so would violate Etsy’s definition of “handmade,” which required artisans to make each product personally. The company loosened the requirement in 2013 in advance of its initial public offering, allowing sellers to hire employees and outsource production to small-scale manufacturers under some conditions. That created its own set of problems, however, as sellers complained that the marketplace had become flooded with cheap, mass-produced goods and that Etsy was “selling out.”

Doubts about Etsy’s ability to scale peaked just as the company went public in April 2015. In the first quarter of that year, Etsy reported a loss of $36.6 million. A month after the close of its first day of trading, Etsy stock had dropped 43 percent. By October 2015, a prominent financial rating firm advised investors to “sell.” Investors deemed the IPO a “flop.”

Enter Handmade at Amazon. Whether intentional or not, Amazon’s strict rules for Handmade— that all items sold on the platform must be made “entirely by hand,” and not mass-produced — seemed targeted at Etsy’s rebelling vendors.

Handmade launched on October 8, 2015. Many news outlets, including Fortune, Time, Business Insider, and others called the portal an “Etsy rival” or “Etsy killer,” and predicted the beginning of Etsy’s end. With Amazon’s huge customer base, considerable resources, and history of vanquishing smaller competitors, Etsy seemed destined to circle the drain.

Handmade has seen moderate growth, but it has not been a runaway hit. Mike Miller, head of Handmade at Amazon, told The Street in February that customer traffic has steadily increased by more than 30 percent month-over-month since the site’s launch, and that sales increased by more than 150 percent month-over-month, although he declined to give hard numbers. As of September, nearly a year post-launch, Handmade at Amazon listed approximately 500,000 total products.

By contrast, Etsy adds millions of listings each month, making Amazon’s total look trifling in comparison. Many sellers on Handmade also maintain an Etsy site, viewing Handmade as an “add on” rather than an essential part of their businesses.

Courtesy of Etsy

Though sellers have their complaints with Etsy, too, many members of the crafting community report being turned off by Handmade’s steep costs. Handmade waived the $39.99 monthly fee it charges sellers for most of its first year of operation, and recently announced that it had extended the waiver through December 2017. Yet many sellers balked at merely the idea of the monthly fee, which would make Handmade considerably more expensive than Etsy, which has a listing fee of 20 cents an item in place of a monthly fee. Handmade also takes a bigger slice out of every transaction: 15 percent compared to Etsy’s 3.5 percent.

If Amazon hadn’t extended the fee waiver, Mark Richardson, who maintains stores on bothsites says he would have cancelled his Handmade account, a sentiment echoed by many sellers interviewed for this article. Richardson, who sells fused glass wall clocks and art, says he sells about half as many items on Handmade per month as he does on Etsy. In addition to the high fees, he found Handmade’s interface difficult to navigate.

But he still gave the site a chance. Like many crafters, he feels disillusioned with Etsy’s expansive marketplace. “Amazon is stricter on that and they verify up front that what you are selling is handmade,” he says. In the end, he prefers Etsy, “because of the ease and the cost structure.” In addition, Richardson feels Handmade does a poor job of promoting itself and its offerings. “I think it’s harder for people to find you on Amazon than on Etsy,” he says.

Manyi Au, who has maintained an Etsy shop since 2006, has similar complaints about the lack of visibility on Handmade. She opened a Handmade account in January 2016 only to close it in August. “It didn’t seem like it generated much traffic at all. With Etsy I can leave it not doing any promotion and I still get sales,” she said.

Robin Romain, who operates Raw Bone Studio and is also active on bothsites, has had something of the opposite experience. She believes that the market has become “saturated” on Etsy, where she struggles to be seen. Romain has done a brisk business on Handmade, equalling or surpassing her monthly sales on Etsy. She gets more traffic on Etsy, but has more sales per page view on Handmade. Like Richardson, however, she agrees that Handmade’s platform is “clunky” and “not very intuitive.” “Amazon’s rules, regulations, algorithms and product uploading are cumbersome and confusing and almost archaic compared to Etsy’s,” she wrote via email.

Romain maintains a deep loyalty to Etsy, which she has used as a storefront since 2009 and which she credits with helping her grow her business: “It was like a college education for me.” She appreciates Etsy’s support of the handmade movement, and finds Amazon’s emphasis on customer satisfaction and quick turn-around troubling. “They always side with the customer and that can put handmade sellers in jeopardy, especially with customized offerings,” she wrote.

This September, close to Handmade’s one-year anniversary, Amazon announced it was expanding the service to Europe. Etsy isn’t worried. In an on-background interview, an Etsy representative noted that Etsy has operated globally since its inception, and that 30 percent of Etsy transactions are conducted between buyers and sellers in different countries.

Meanwhile, Etsy’s stock appears to have recovered. And in the first quarter of this year, the company turned a profit for the first time in five years. “We’ve been around for 11 years,” the representative said. “We’ve seen competitors come and go.” If Amazon wants to shake Etsy from its perch, it needs to listen a whole lot more closely to the crafters it’s trying to lure.